Education: Technology for Turkey

There was only a brief ceremony for the 30 students receiving their college degrees in a drab, grey building behind the Turkish Parliament in Ankara. Barely a handful of people were present. The students had no caps and gowns; nor were their diplomas engraved in traditional fashion—just plain typed certificates. But if the surroundings were drab last week, the occasion was not. It was the first graduation of the Middle East Technical University, organized to overcome the lag in technical education in the underdeveloped Middle East, and to do it in a hurry. Says the school’s American president, Edwin S. Burdell: “Education in Turkey is about 100 years behind the U.S. in terms of methods and facilities, but we hope to catch up in five years.”

METU is the result of high dreams and hard work. At dinner one night in Ankara five years ago, Charles Abrams, a U.S. housing expert on a United Nations mission, commiserated with Vecdi Diker, at that time Turkey’s highway director, over the state of Turkish education. Both agreed that what Turkey needed most was a technical college. While Diker sold the idea to his government, Abrams sold it to the U.N. The U.N. chipped in $1.500,000, its largest contribution to date to any educational institution, to help start the school, and by the fall of 1956 the first architecture class was at work. Within two years, METU had grown to four schools (architecture and city planning; engineering; administrative sciences; arts and sciences), and in May 1959 it was formally chartered by the Turkish government. This spring Burdell was persuaded to leave his job of 22 years as the resourceful head of Manhattan’s Cooper Union and spend three years molding METU’s parts into a smoothly functioning university. Then he will pass on the job to a Turkish president. Says he: “We are all working as hard as we can to put ourselves out of work.”

Knowledge That Works. Plans are for METU to serve not just Turkey but the entire Middle East. Though this year’s graduates are all Turkish, about 12% of the school’s 515 students come from other countries in the area, and the figure will rise to as much as 20%. Most of the students are still from upper-class backgrounds; since English is the modern world’s technical lingua franca, all studies are conducted in English, and only the best-educated students are equipped to understand the texts. But in time, President Burdell expects his enrollment to include ”sons and daughters of peasants of Anatolia, miners of Zonguldak, fishing families of the Black Sea.” In keeping with the students, the faculty is international. Many are Turks, but there are also Americans, Englishmen, Norwegians, Dutch, Canadians.

The professors from far away are bringing a new kind of study to the region. There is a rare, informal atmosphere to the school, with plenty of classroom give and take. Says Student Ozcan Esmer, 21: “In other universities students have only one instructor, who talks all the time, and you don’t dare ask advice or questions.” The students learn practical answers to practical problems that they can see all around their underdeveloped land. And by learning on home ground they are in a better position than many students who go abroad and come back filled with knowledge that may or may not apply to the home region.

Academic Freedom. Though Turkey pays the biggest share of the school’s annual budget ($2,400,000 this year), METU also gets about $600,000 annually from many international sources. It has more autonomy than most other higher-educational institutions in the Middle East. Though the Minister of Education has a voice in financial matters, the president and his trustees make the policies. Turkey’s recent military coup caused some anxious moments, and Burdell expects that he will have to justify some of the schemes decided upon during the Menderes regime. “We can only go as fast as the new government permits us to go. But we may actually emerge a more solid institution in the end.”

The project that everyone hopes the new government will continue to support is a vast expansion starting late next year. The plans are to start work on a handsome permanent campus on a 12,000-acre plot that was donated by the Menderes government. The land is now filled with wheat and grazing sheep. But METU’s visionaries expect it to be the seat of a great university city with a student population of 12,000 and an overall population of 20,000. And they look on it as the model for a succession of similar schools that will some day rise throughout the Middle East.